Rio De Janeiro is a bustling metropolis in a booming country–and, increasingly, an example of how government and business leaders can cooperate to make cities work better. Join the live blog today for a second day of coverage of speeches, panels and hallway discussions.

Update:

Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.

Cities have transformed themselves with such intensity. The challenge of the 21st Century is to build a better urban environment.

“We can’t build cities in the conventional way. We would destroy the planet.” We have to use smart technologies and ideas to build cities in a sustainable way, and a way that provides jobs and economic growth.

In the future there will be super cities and mega metropolitan areas. Between Washington DC and Boston, for instance. We’ll need new transportation systems. The cities in the corridor will share talents.The same in Europe: From Lisbon to Madrid; ultimately you’ll get a huge cluster of connected cities in Europe. “This is the new scale in which you can compete.”

Some exampled of smart cities: Singapore, the new city state. They bet on a port economy. They have smart transportation. They attract talent focusing on IT, media and bio-med. In compact urban spaces they have combined expertise and creativity.

Bilbao, Spain. It integrated all of the systems. It integrated art with urban architecture. Bilbao hasn’t been successful in attracting talent. This will be a big challenge. It has to compete with other cities in a knowledge economy.

The challenge is to build a new urban development park, which will include all of the modern elements: architecture, art, communications, and improved infrastructure.

Bercovich: We need to rethink the state so we can rise to the challenges of urbanization. A wide variety of stakeholders need to cooperate and innovate.

The free market has created distortions in the social fabric of cities. There’s a huge disparity in wealth and services. This needs to be addressed.

Smarter platforms are the base from which we make the systems of cities and regions work better. For instance, broadband needs to be made available widely and affordably.

Allard: Urban centers, if they’re smarter, can begin to address some of the inequities. They can be a source of economic opportunity for the people of the favelas.

In the future the rate of population growth will go down, and that will make it possible for personal income to come up. Latin American cities will get wealthier and offer new opportunities. “We will have a population that demands a better quality of life.”

“Favelas are full of small entrepreneurs who will make the most of the opportunities that are offered to them.” Little by little, they’ll reach the middle class.

10:30 a.m. Special Address: Smart Investments in Cities: Managing for the Long-Term, by Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank.

The quality of life in cities and the city ecosystem constitute key factor in innovation going forward. Traditionally we saw that innovation was is driven by three pillars: big private companies, government subsidies and universities. But that’s the old paradigm. Now there are additional factors: cities, NGOs and society.

If we can make cities more efficient we can increase their creative output. A smart city doesn’t just need to be efficient. It needs to have quality of life and creativity. “A city is an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity.”

Technological progress will increase in the coming years. Mobile computing is going to be an important factor. Broadband access is increasing greatly. We need to deploy sensors, and large scale databases.

All of this makes information about what’s going on in the city and how it’s working widely available to everybody.

“The city is becoming a new thing.”

In Latin America and Brazil, cities are a bigger factor than they are in other areas of the world. We have 34 cities in Brazil with 45% of the population, and Rio and Sao Paulo have 25% of the GDP of the country. “We need to reinforce the mid-tier cities and prevent them from falling into the same traps as the mega cities, with their traffic and pollution problems.”

We’re at a critical moment in Brazil. We must have a high level of performance and competitiveness. Our public services must be more efficient and more creative.

Breyer: I’m interested in investing in Brazil. We think through the cultural attributes of great entrepreneurs. Is there a common characteristic?

“The people we like to back have passion, think about long term impact and think about building high impact team from the beginning.”

We’ve seen many of these characteristics in Brazil. We see entrepreneurs building strong teams of co-founders. Every location is a little different. In Silicon Valley today we’re finding very young breakthrough technologists. When I first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I took him out to dinner and I offered him a glass of wine, but he said he was not yet 21. He’d have a Sprite.

Brazil will be one of our three most important countries for investments in the coming years.

Coutinho: In Brazil, we need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship. The Brazilian capital markets are still a step behind. “We need to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurship by young people. That’s vital to creating smarter cities.”

Regueira; What we need for venture capital to take off in Brazil is a quarter of a billion dollar exit.

Breyer: The city and country have to minimize the difficulties for young people to get going. One thing we have lost in the US is the idea of allowing small businesses to thrive without uncertainty and significant regulatory overhang.

You need a partnership between great entrepreneurs, people who come in early to help them scale the company—without losing the entrepreneurial spirit, and also partnerships with large and important companies.

“The first trillion dollar valuation company could come from Brazil.”

Here’s the video of the panel:

————————–

11:30 a.m. Special Address: How to Build a Smarter City, by Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and strategy—and next CEO.

“Brazil is a country full of natural resources. We think of information as the world’s next important national resource.”

We’re heard a lot about why people should build smarter cities. My focus today is on how.

So how does a city actually get started? Over the last year or so, we’ve reviewed thousands of Smart City initiatives. We’ve identified three common steps that are taken in successful projects.

–By instrumenting different city systems, the city can leverage data as a strategic tool to understand the performance of those systems, and be in a position to managing them better–responding to changes in those systems more rapidly and effectively.

–Once a city has developed that solid foundation, they can start to think about integrating key processes within and across systems. You can take the data and use it across departments and functions.

–Cities can start to optimize their systems and transform service delivery. Analytics become key here. “You can start to re-imagine the art of the possible.” It’s not just about using analytics to examine the past, but to predict the future.

Value goes up with each of these three steps.

We have also identified key leadership skills for Smarter cities.

–The complexity of cities requires us to understand the city as a system-of-systems and manage it accordingly.

–Managing and coordinating across city systems will require all city leaders to collaborate with one another, with local business leaders, and other influencers in new ways.

I hope that we’ve been able to provide some guiding principles here that we’ve learned from hundreds of Smarter City engagements, and that have opened our eyes as to what it takes for cities to be successful.

Schwartz: Tulane was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We had to shut it down for months. Now we’re back and the city of New Orleans is back. We’re both building more sustainably and smarter.

We’re using the school of architecture and technology from IBM to see if we can achieve significant carbon use. We’ll take what we learn to other buildings on the campus.

Instrumentation was relatively easy. Integration was harder. We had to get our school, IT and facilities to work together.

“We think of buildings as the building blocks of cities.” You can experiment in buildings and a university campus and then model solutions that you can use city wide.

Gerdau: We started a movement to build the economy of Brazil based on using management technologies.

The public sector is inefficient.

“What decides a country’s wealth today is its management competency.”

Cities have to be build and rebuilt by seeing them as an integrated unit. Technology is important for gathering information, but it’s not enough.

You need to do management with efficient technology. But it only works when your have good governance aligned with strategy.

Political will is perhaps the biggest challenge. I like to talk to government leaders. I feel there’s lack of policy. We have to transform cities. It requires the kind of strategic thinking I don’t see now.

We have to get our communities involved so they see this is the way forward. Maybe it’s in our education. Time is being wasted. How can we harness all of this?

“We have to change culture.”

————————–

12:15 p.m. Key Observations from Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO.

We operate in 170 countries and every political system. All societies are going through a transition. The same goes with companies. You can be optimistic or see it as concerning. How do some do it better than others?

Your have to re-prioritize. You have to take things that were done one way in the past and come up with new approaches.

Mayor Paes of Rio surrounded himself with professional managers. “Good management is the key to getting things done.”

Banavar: There’s an impression that more disasters are happening. Part of it is that because of modern communications, we know more about what’s happening. But it’s true for floods, perhaps caused by global warming. There are also man-made disasters, such as nuclear disasters. These kinds of massive events require a long term planning, preparedness and response system.

Factoid: $265 billion total global economic losses due to natural disasters in the first half of 2011.

We can do a lot to prevent these kinds of losses.

We’ll look at four types of events: natural disasters, terrorism, industrial accidents and large-scale events like protests and riots, but also the World Cup and the Olympics.

The density of communities in coastal communities has been increasing, and those populations are the most vulnerable

Four stages for managing disasters: Mitigation, such as building codes; short-term preparedness, responding to warnings; response with full situational awareness of what’s happening; recovery and long term rehabilitation.

Osorio: We have two major challenges in Rio. We have a history of natural disasters mainly caused by heavy rains and flooding and mudslides, and we have a history of dealing with large scale events.

We were very poorly prepared to face natural disasters.

Every five or six years on average we have a major natural event, but we have flooding every year. We have had two big events in the past two years. It seems to be a pattern. It could be global warming.

In the past we’d say it’s god’s will. We just reacted.

The city decided to approach the situation head on. We felt it was our obligation to meet the challenge in a different way.

They mayor who is 42 started his political life as deputy mayor in part of the city. He was in charge of the region when it had a disaster about 14 years ago.

When he became mayor, he was the emergency response plans and felt it wasn’t enough. Early 2009. He ordered a study.

We had a major disaster–incredible rain. More than 70 people died here. We used the plan to some extent, but not enough

We decided to have an emergency response center but later decided to make a city operations center to handle a wide variety of situations.

We had an organization with many fiefdoms, but, in order to respond to disasters, you have to cooperate. They mayor made people work together.

So we have become much more agile.

We’re facing big events coming to Rio, including the World Cup and Olympics. They’re a big challenge for us. They’re big and complex events. The operation center is a major tool to enable our preparations and response.

This year, we had the Rock in Rio festival with 700,000 people. The last edition was 2001 and was a total disaster. Nobody could move in the area. But this year the operational part worked well. We reacted very quickly, and the operations center was instrumental. We think we’ll be ready for what’s coming.

Allard: In Chile we had the large earthquake and tsunami, and it was also widely dispersed. We had more than 700 kilometers of land affected. The disaster affected the three main metro areas in Chile and many smaller cities. Five major highways were broken. Many buildings fell—even some built in the past few years. More than 500 people died. 370,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

The neighboring communities had to come and help the ones that were affected.

First response, lasted 33 days. It was coordinated by the emergency ministry.

Reconstruction is expected to take four years.

I worked on the reconstruction.

We opened a voluntary record for families that had suffered damage. This helped us relocate them. They received vouchers.

We arranged for houses to be rebuilt by private companies. These projects were subsidized.

Six months after the catastrophe we had 60,000 emergency houses built, where people could stay while their permanent houses were built.

It was a huge management challenge. We had to track people’s identity and map it to their location and what was being done for them.

We invited companies to present different kind of building systems. We had a fair where the families could go and chose the type of house.

We had voting by the people to chose the best designs. The winners started quickly.

But we also wanted to use the rebuilding to create smart options. We studied the risks in locations by the coast.

For places that were especially vulnerable, we designed the houses to be resilient to quakes and tsunamis.

By this September we had more than 60,000 houses built and more than 200,000 under construction. We expect to have all the houses built in February 2014.

After looking at a number of the blog articles on your web page, I really appreciate your way of blogging.
I added it to my bookmark website list and will be checking back in the near future.
Please check out my website too and tell me how you feel.

Great post. I was checking continuously this blog and I’m impressed!
Very useful inforkation specifically the last part :) I cafe for such info much.
I was seeking this pafticular info for a long time. Thannk you and good luck.

Thanks for another wonderful article. The place else may jusst anyone get
that type oof info in such an ideal approach of writing?
I’ve a presentation subsequent week, and I’m aat the loook for such information.

Thanks foor some other fantastic article.
Thee place else may anybody get that type of informatiion iin such an ideql manner of writing?
I’ve a presentation next week, and I’m oon the search
for such info.

Hey There. I found your blog using msn. This is
a really well written article. I’ll make sure to bookmark it
and come back to read more of your useful info.
Thanks for the post. I’ll certainly comeback.

This dedicated app helps you in maintaining your social connect 24 by 7.

For a limited time Verizon’s offering a two-for-one deal: you can
get two M8s for a total of $199. Even when on the go business men can complete
all their tasks using to-do lists, tracking due dates, capturing whiteboard brainstorms etc, via their appllications
on iPhone. @chpwn ‘ this developer is responsible for
some of the coolest tweaks available in Cydia.
In such cases security of data transferred remains a critical issue, and the questions arise that are our
android devices secure enough for transferring sensitive data.

You will find numbers about products will be able to
on your machine the instant you prefer to jailbreak doing it.
In the battery tab, you will find a list of how many
minutes of usage you can expect to get if you were to use your phone
in various ways, from standby mode to 3D gaming, and everything in between.
You may have a few different alternatives for scrolling via your iPhone’s contact checklist.

There is less time needed for programming and the all new developer interface is fresh and user friendly.
These offices have a listing of graant giving bodies or individuals who may
be willing to award you the grant. For some speculation on what might be in iOS 5 check that link.

When I fiurst heard about it, I couldn’t believe it. The demand for such developers has ihcreased
by 500% globally in a span of six. If you think tthat there are problems with your jailbreak iphones
for tmobile then troubleshoot it. The jailbreak tool
caan be found at either major news source quoted in this article by clicking on their name.
There are thousands of applications that you can download in your device.
Once you jailbreak your Aple device you will not lose any of the features and functionality of your device.
It’s available for individuals of other nations around the world exactly who use Unlock iphone 4 and thus,
do not have AT&T convenience. After you gget to the industry that
asks on your APN username and password, set in the number of phrases which
will prevent your apple iphone from providing providers the appropriate values.
iPhone comes in different types, from 3Gs to 4Gs,
with 4G being the latest. In short it lets you learn on the go, and keep track
of the most interesting notes and media that students might need forr a class project or presentation.
Although it does cost money it comes with an application called MiWi 4.
Making your iPhone app stand out amongst the competition iss a complete tutorial in itself.
Step 9: Connect your iPhone to the computer and turn it Off.
Apple iPhone was in highlights from the time the informkation leaked out
about its features.

Hi there, I believe your web site could be having internet browser compatibility
problems. Whenever I look at your site in Safari, it looks fine however, if opening in I.E., it’s got some overlapping issues.

I just wanted to give you a quick heads up! Aside
from that, fantastic site!

I am curious to find out what blog system you’re using? I’m experiencing some small security issues with my latest website and I would
like to find something more safeguarded. Do you have any recommendations?

Hello Joe, nice post. Please do contact us. Many cities/residential use our products. We are manufacturers of the atmospheric water dispenser and water filtration systems. We participate in alot of environmental and disaster relief programs too. Basically, our water dispenser and industrial machines produce drinking water from air without a water supply/source. Pls see our website for more info.
We are looking to partner with like minded individuals/companies with our products to help the world. Awaiting your reply.

It looks more manageable too as most are made of polished metal,
hard plastic and ligh but substantial wood. This might cost a few
hundred dollqrs or less depending on howw big the item is and how complex the
upholstery is going to be. Free Debt consolidation may seem like a daunting task,
but yoou have to be proactive if you want to get your finances
in order.

of course like your web site but you have to check the spelling on quite a few of your posts. Many of them are rife with spelling problems and I to find it very bothersome to tell the reality then again I¡¦ll definitely come again again.

I was just searching for this info for a while. After six hours of continuous Googleing, at last I got it in your website. I wonder what’s the lack of Google strategy that don’t rank this kind of informative web sites in top of the list. Generally the top web sites are full of garbage.

Nice post. I study something tougher on totally different blogs everyday. It’ll all the time be stimulating to read content from other writers and follow slightly something from their store. I�d favor to use some with the content on my blog whether you don�t mind. Natually I�ll offer you a link on your net blog. Thanks for sharing.

When I initially commented I clicked the -Notify me when new feedback are added- checkbox and now every time a remark is added I get 4 emails with the identical comment. Is there any manner you may take away me from that service? Thanks!

I�m impressed, I need to say. Really not often do I encounter a blog that�s both educative and entertaining, and let me inform you, you might have hit the nail on the head. Your concept is outstanding; the difficulty is something that not enough individuals are speaking intelligently about. I am very completely happy that I stumbled across this in my search for something referring to this.

Good post. I learn one thing more challenging on different blogs everyday. It’ll always be stimulating to learn content material from different writers and apply slightly one thing from their store. I�d favor to make use of some with the content material on my weblog whether or not you don�t mind. Natually I�ll give you a hyperlink in your web blog. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for posting these notes. There’s a lot of rich information that can be used and applied globally. A question I have and not sure if it came up. How can one maintain the prioritization of the services offered when you have political changes in governments (various levels) every 4+ years? In some other countries/cities, changing governments also means changing priorities. Was this discussed and if so, could you share any insights?

Posted by: Luanne

November 14, 20114:20 am

I think that anytime you doing something differently or new, your brain is working or creating new memory of that task which is like exercising for the brain, so I think the task mentioned in the article will surely accomplished this.

The dicissions are great .. we must take advantage to bulid a better country, better world .. I would love to be seeing that in person .. and hope will have a video or a recap we could see. So far .. I will be following the chat

Building a Smarter Planet is a blog intended to provide readers with thought-provoking content and a place to talk about the issues raised within the content. It is our hope that you will feel compelled to share some of the things you see, read and hear on this blog with your friends, family and peers. We feel strongly that this blog is not going to deliver final answers to the issues raised, but that it will represent a starting point for conversation around the issues.